a musical love affair
by Kandros Fir
Summary: a story of music, miracles and love set to the back drop of the Holocaust.


I first met her on the banks of the Danube river playing her heart out on a beaten up brass trumpet. I never learned the name of the song but I shall never forget it. The song has been etched upon the wounds of time by nostalgia that powerful balm that sweetens all memories. It went something like, "Fly, thought, on wings of gold, go settle upon the slopes and the hills where the sweet airs of our native soil smell soft and mild! Greet the banks of the river Jordan and Zion's tumbled towers. Oh, my country, so lovely and lost! Oh remembrance so dear yet unhappy!"

I could only pause and let the song dance around me in its somber waltz too astonished to speak. When she finally ended her spell I rushed forward towards her, crossing the banks of the Danube not really caring if my Sunday best got sullied.

"Hello," I said, "I'm Gerard. When can I hear you play again?"

"Hi, I'm Erza, I come here to practice for my synagogue every Sunday."

"Then I'll come here every day after church."

"I look forward to seeing you."

I was too young then to understand the prejudices and barriers of the world. In those days, the pure universal language of music spoke to me, and I knew oh so blessedly little of the rhetoric of hate and violence.

And so I met her a second time and then a third and a fourth, never disappointed. She always gave her best and when she played the river ceased its babbling and listened. The sun edged ever closer to her mouth piece for the same reason. She looked like a goddess descended upon the earth, so close yet so far away.

On the sixth day, I decided that I wanted to impress her with my own music. My father was a fairly well known composer who had me listening to and playing the classics almost as soon as I could talk. I could reasonably do well with Beethoven and Mozart, but it was with Bach where I truly shined for I liked him best. As my father put it, other composers merely sipped from the elixir of genius but Bach drained it, savoring every drop.

I snuck us into a new shiny church that had recently been built with an old grand organ and a creepy priest with a plastic smile and shifty eyes. He caught us, but merely flashed an indulgent smile before waving his permission and leaving to go about his business. In the end I played the partista. I loved it because it reminded me of a gentle dream, and that was the way I felt with Erza.

I was painfully aware of every mistake and discordant note, cursing myself for my arrogance in believing I could match up to her, but Erza didn't notice them and when I was done she applauded me as if I had played like a master.

"You're good, could you teach me to play the piano like you do?"

I was excited, Erza, the goddess of music wanted me to teach her?

"Of course," I said, then working up my courage, I asked her, "Could you teach me to play the trumpet?"

"Then let's meet here every Sunday, if the priest will agree."

The priest put up no protest to our request merely nodding his agreement and shooing us off with a slight smile that seemed to say, "Foolish children, enjoy your youth".

So we met up again for the next six years after people had long left at that shiny new church that had gained a layer of rust on its gates and some moss creeped up on its stained glass windows, but otherwise still the same. We stayed mostly the same too, or so I mistakenly thought back then. We played together, and we might have engaged in conversation outside of music, and we might have went to each other on problems in our personal life, and we might have played innocent little games, a brush of the finger tips here, a kiss on the cheek here, but I thought things would never change. Now that I look back, I realize I was already in love with her.

I also went to high school during those years and I felt alienated. I was a son of a composer with an overpowering love for music. I couldn't speak to other boys on topics like football or sex, or beer or even studies. As for girls, I was popular amongst them for knowing classical music and being willing to play a piece on the school studio piano, but I never got further than that. It was partly my fault I'm afraid, I could get along with others but I had Erza so I saw no need to. In crude terms, it was like eating takeout after feasting with the gods.

Then in 1933 Hitler happened and it became harder to see Erza with all the new restrictions that were being passed. Still, all that had happened was that our weekly Sunday afternoon sessions had become a game, a dangerous one that could make or break us. We were young and foolish and I was in love with her.

Then in the winter of 1936 Erza and her family were carted off in a gray metal box far, far away, and I was forced to join the Hitler youth. That day I played Beethoven's twenty sixth sonata farewell with tears streaming down my cheeks.

I hated the Hitler youth. It was meaningless exercise after meaningless exercise with leaders who behaved like sycophants but what I really hated was the music. Behind the music of the Hitler Youth was the crude force of nationalism without subtlety or complexity. It was the merging and drowning out of individual voices into one ugly forceful sound without any of the beauty that lay in the human heart.

Then in 1939 the war happened and I was sent to man a concentration camp in the East. The leader of the camp, a bald stocky man was the superstitious sort, and after learning I could play the trumpet, had me play German war songs at each gassing of the Jews to rest the spirits of the dead. At first, every time I blew on the mouthpiece a piece of my soul flew out of the trumpet to die in the gas chambers until I had no more soul left to give. I died there at that concentration camp at the sound of the trumpet as surely as those Jews had. I became mechanical and robotic, living only to play and I played to die. I was beyond caring about ethics, beyond hope, beyond despair beyond anything human. I played that trumpet every day in between 1939 and 1942, earning the well-deserved nick name the angel of death.

Then on a particularly sunny day in the spring of 1942, as I raised my trumpet to my lips in the crowd awaiting execution I thought I saw Erza. Just a flash of her luscious red locks and then it was gone. A wisp of a memory, taunting, teasing, enlarged and made more real by the suffering of the camps. Nothing major, it shouldn't have affected me, but it haunted me and shattered my apathy and armor of complacency. It was enough to restore something human within me, enough that instead of playing the usual German war song, instead I played the very first song I had heard when I met her, ""Fly, thought, on wings of gold, go settle upon the slopes and the hills where the sweet airs of our native soil smell soft and mild! Greet the banks of the river Jordan and Zion's tumbled towers. Oh, my country, so lovely and lost! Oh remembrance so dear yet unhappy!"

From atop my tower I felt the air grow still and the sunlight move closer. For a moment I felt the revolution of the earth still as if holding its breath, expecting something. I felt the confusion of my fellow soldiers as they wondered what the hell I was doing, and the anger of my commander at my insubordination. The commander had a bad feeling about executions that day and postponed them until tomorrow, then had me arrested for a tribunal. I knew that I had done little to deserve punishment, I had played a song, just not the song he wanted and that was a minor case, but these were the concentration camps, and the word of the camp leader was like God.

As my fellow soldiers rushed the tower I closed my eyes and raised my eyes upward, to gaze for what was likely the last time upon the glory of heaven. I would never again enjoy the sky the same way I had then.

What my punishment was going to be, I never had to find out. The very next day, an American unit liberated this concentration camp, slipping past its defenses without anyone knowing. My compatriots were confounded, blaming bad luck, or wily Americans as they surrendered. Me, I knew, that when I had blown on that trumpet, I had sent a prayer to God in music the language of heaven and He had answered with a miracle.

I was kept in a prisoner of war camp for the rest of the war, until they decided to let me go without charges based on the testimony of witnesses who had seen me defy orders. I spent the next year combing through Nazi records to find out that Erza was not dead, after that, I searched for her all over Europe until I found her once again on the banks of the Danube. She was not playing a trumpet at the time and she was so horrible emaciated I feared that I was staring at a corpse. As I stood in front of her I felt my guilt crystallize into tears and fall down my face freely. I hugged her tightly and whispered "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry…" about a thousand times trying to cram the mountain of my regret into those two words. This time it felt more like I was holding onto a ghost rather than a goddess.

It was then that I made my confession to her. I did not say "I love you" for I was undeserving. Rather I said, "Do I still have the right to remain by your side," which amounted to the same thing.

She was weeping too hard to speak, but I took the nodding of her head as assent.

_A/N: you know how occasionally you'll get an awesome idea that keeps you up at night thinking about how to write it and haunts your waking days? This was mine and not going to lie this is probably the best story I'll ever write. I'm not even going to try to hide how proud I am of this, or how much it broke my heart to write this. But it has a happy ending, sort of. Please read and review. For this story more than any other one. I'm sorry if anyone is offended by the setting of Nazi Germany. And the song that Erza sings is part of the chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from the Italian opera Nabucco. _


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